0.7 A conversation about measuring emotion and its conclusion: mood  (Page 3/26)

The way you brought it up reminds me of waiting for a phone call from a friend when maybe reading a sad novel. You get so into every page your nearly living the drama feeling more and more concerned for the direction of the protagonist. Then suddenly the phone rings and your perk up with a contradicting grin. This to me acts out a scenario of what you mentioned. ...

Mark: Ok. I think a way to measure emotions would be for the person experiencing the emotions to describe what the emotion feels like. Something that might help them do that would be to compare the experience or time period or object or whatever you want to know how it made them feel to things where they know what the feeling was like. For instance someone could say, "going to the restaurant felt more like talking to my girlfriend than moving lawns". So I think the only thing you can use really is things where they have identified what the feeling is like. If they don't know how something made them feel I don't know if they could use that to compare it with because it wouldn't be significant. If they say, That is kind of obvious though, the only way to describe how you feel would be to say what the emotion you felt was or compare it to something else significant. Maybe talking about significant things would put the person in a higher emotional state where they obviously appear to be more emotional. I noticed people when they are experiencing intense emotions, it is obvious to me - their eyes get watery or intense looking. Maybe in this state you could measure emotions better because they are really feeling emotions then and are being emotional. There is obviously a physical reaction in this higher state (the eyes I mentioned for instance). I also sometimes notice that there is at least a slight change in tone or whatnot when a person realizes something significant or just changes tone and starts to feel a new emotion that might be strong or not. I don't know if in the higher emotional state you could compare and rate different physical clues to different types of emotion. Though it would seem to me like it would be easier to see how someone feels about something when they are really in a "feeling" kind of mood. I guess an example of this would be someone saying "I don't care about that, it was nothing like (this other thing I felt)" Then maybe you measure the strong thing they felt by describing about how intense it was for them. I think in this higher more intense emotional state people could more obviously display how they feel about certain things, for instance if you mention something their eyes could glow or be really intense for those seconds and this would tell you rather well what the thing you mentioned felt like.

But I guess it's obvious that emotion is expressed in the eyes very well. You can just use logic to guess what someone might be feeling after you studied their emotions in the higher emotional state. This is kind of like ink blot tests - once a psychology researcher did the test on me and said I was depressed. I realized later that she was able to read my emotions better by doing the test and evoking that emotion from me. If you just go through someones significant life experiences you might be able make them more emotional or easier to read. That I would say is the only way to measure emotion, other than studying them and trying to figure out what makes them feel. I also think you might be able to use computers to analyze exactly what someone is feeling by looking at changes in the eyes and analyzing those changes carefully - but I am not in a position to do that. The eyes display so much information, you could easily measure subtle changes and observe those changes in a real situation.